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Child Watch® Column: "A Call to End Child Poverty Now"

America is going
to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible
for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life. —Martin
Luther King Jr.

They
have become great and
richthey
have grown fat and sleek. …they
judge not with justice the
cause of their fatherless …and
they do not defend the rights of the needy. —Jeremiah 5:27–28

Once
to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,In the
strife of Truth with Falsehood for the good or evil side;Some
great Cause, God’s New Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,Parts
the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,And
the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light. —James
Russell Lowell

It is a national moral
disgrace that there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely
poor children in the United States of America – the world’s largest economy. It
is also unnecessary, costly and the greatest threat to our future national,
economic and military security.

There are more poor children in America than the combined residents in six of
our largest U.S. cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and
San Antonio with a combined total population of 14.6 million residents. There
are more children living in extreme poverty in the United States (6.5 million)
than there are total residents in 33 individual states and the District of Columbia.

The
younger children are the poorer they are during their years of greatest brain
development. Every other American baby is non-White and 1 in 2 Black babies is
poor, 150 years after slavery was legally abolished.

America’s
poor children did not ask to be born; did not choose their parents, country,
state, neighborhood, race, color, or faith. In fact if they had been born in 33
other industrialized
countries they would be less likely to be poor. Among these 35 countries,
America ranks 34th in relative child poverty – ahead only of Romania
whose economy is 99 percent smaller than ours.

The
United Kingdom, whose economy, if it were an American state, would rank just
above Mississippi according to the Washington Post, committed to and succeeded
in cutting its child poverty rate by half in 10 years. It is about values
and political will. Sadly, politics in our nation too often trumps good policy
and moral decency and responsibility to the next generation and the nation’s
future. It is way past time for a critical mass of Americans to confront the hypocrisy
of America’s pretension to be a fair playing field while almost 15 million
children languish in poverty.

The
Children’s Defense Fund just released a groundbreaking new report, Ending Child Poverty Now, that calls
for an end to child poverty in the richest nation on earth with a 60 percent
reduction immediately. And it shows that
solutions to ending child poverty in our nation already exist and for the first
time how, by combining expanded investments in existing policies and programs
that work, we can shrink overall child poverty 60 percent, Black child poverty
72 percent, and improve economic circumstances for 97 percent of poor children
at a cost of $77.2 billion a year. These policies could be and should be pursued
immediately, improving the lives and futures of millions of children and
eventually saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Child poverty is way too expensive to continue. Every year we keep 14.7 million
children in poverty costs our nation $500 billion – six times more than the $77
billion investment we propose to reduce child poverty by 60 percent. MIT Nobel
Laureate economist and 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Dr. Robert
Solow in his foreword to a 1994 CDF report Wasting America’s Future
presciently wrote: “For many years Americans have allowed child poverty levels
to remain astonishingly high … far higher than one would think a rich and
ethical society would tolerate. The justification, when one is offered at all,
has often been that action is expensive: ‘We have more will than wallet.’ I
suspect that in fact our wallets exceed our will, but in any event this concern
for the drain on our resources completely misses the other side of the
equation: Inaction has its costs too … As an economist I believe that good
things are worth paying for; and that even if curing children’s poverty were
expensive, it would be hard to think of a better use in the world for money. If
society cares about children, it should be willing to spend money on them.”

It
makes no economic sense to continue to spend on average three times more per
prisoner than per public school pupil and continue to build a massive prison
industrial complex that has become the new American apartheid. And it is
profoundly unjust to continue making budget cuts in safety net programs to feed
and house the poor and not provide an opportunity and decent wages for parents
who work while increasing wealth and income inequality fueled by hundreds of
billions of dollars of tax breaks for the top one percent from many tax
loopholes described in the report.

Not only does child poverty cost far
more than eliminating it would, we have so many better choices that reflect
more just values as well as economic savings. We believe that food, shelter, quality
early childhood investments to get every child ready for school and an
equitable education for all children should take precedence over massive
welfare for the rich and blatantly excessive spending for military weapons that
often do not work. If we built 485 fewer of the planned 2,500 F-35s that still
don’t work reliably and are over budget we could fund the $77 billion required
to lift 60 percent of our children from poverty now as their minds and bodies
are developing.

President Eisenhower, a former five star general, reminded us that: “Every gun that is made, every
warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies…a theft from those who hunger
and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is
not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius
of its scientists, and the hope of its children.” Yet we are spending $48.2 billion a month; $11.1 billion a week; $1.6 billion a day;
$66 million an hour; $1.1 million a minute; and $18,323 a second on the
military.

If we love America and love our children we must all stand against the
excessive greed and militarism that tramples millions of our children entrusted
to our care. America’s Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their
creator with certain inalienable rights.” After more than two centuries, it is
time to make those truths evident in the lives of all poor children and to
close our intolerable national hypocrisy gap and show the world whether
democratic capitalism is an oxymoron or can work in a majority non-White world
desperate for moral example. Please download a copy of Ending Child Poverty Now, share it widely with your networks and
then take action. Together, acting with urgency and persistence, we can end
preventable and devastating child poverty across our country. A nation that
does not stand for its children does not stand for anything and will not stand
tall in the 21st century world or before God.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children's Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to www.childrensdefense.org.